02 Nicole Pohl Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu and her correspondence

This paper explores the intricacies and problems of creating a digital archive. The case study is the Bluestocking hostess, entrepreneur, and literary critic, Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) and her approx. 8,000 extant letters which are housed in different archives (public and private), and continents. The charity Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO) is an open-access digital project to digitize, annotate, and publish all extant letters written by Elizabeth Montagu to a range of correspondents who were all crucial members of eighteenth-century polite society. EMCO has had to tackle (and is still tackling) different methodological and structural obstacles: a) to trace all extant letters by Elizabeth Montagu — this process is still ongoing b) to marry the extant correspondence located in different archives into one digital archive c) to develop tools beyond the transcription/annotation process, fostering novel methods of scholarly research and debate which utilize the opportunities offered by digital resources and methods